OCZ Technology is currently one of the top Solid State Drive manufacturers in the world. They have been aggressively developing new SSD products and bringing them to market, and can be credited for driving prices down through mass production and economies of scale.

As the company has never been afraid to experiment, they have tried prototypes with SSD flash controllers from different manufacturers. JMicron controllers are amongst the cheapest, so they go in lower end SSDs such as the Core and Solid series. The mid-range Apex series uses a JMicron RAID controller along with their flash controllers to improve performance. The high-end Vertex series uses a new flash controller from Indilinx that utilizes 64MB of cache to improve random read/write performance.

OCZ is currently developing their newest SSD series and will target it at the "premium" market. The Summit series uses a controller and firmware developed by Samsung. It also uses 64MB of cache to improve random read and write performance.

Sequential read speeds are expected around the 250MB/s range, while sequential write speeds are expected to be in excess of 200MB/s. Figures for random read and write speeds are currently unavailable, but those are increasingly becoming looked at by educated consumers as they more accurately represent real-world usage models. The firmware is still being tweaked, so performance numbers have not been finalized.

The design is similar to Samsung's own 256GB SSDs, which are currently available only to OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers). Power consumption for the Summit series should be also comparable, using around 1 watt at load. There will be 30GB, 60GB, 120GB, and 250GB models.

The Summit series is currently targeted for launch around the end of April. Pricing is expected to be moderately above the Vertex series, which has dropped dramatically in price over the last month. The 120GB Vertex model can now be purchased for around $300 with a mail-in rebate.

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